Other notable announcements and developments today…

• Universal Music and tech company HP have extended their ongoing partnership for another three years. The latest addition to the stuff they do together is this HP Lounge app. “Millennials love HP computers for work, rest and play”, said HP’s VP Consumer Personal Systems EMEA Pascal Bourguet, confusing HP computers with Mars bars.

• Rustie has uploaded a new track to SoundCloud, created in A&E after being admitted due to complications related to diabetes. “They keep givin me free extra livez! So here’s another free track, made after waking [up] in A&E”, he tweeted.

Hewlett-Packard has asked that a lawsuit being pursued against it by American singer and ‘The Twist’ man Chubby Checker, over an app available in its app store, be dismissed.

As previously reported, Checker sued HP over an app it distributed called ‘The Chubby Checker’, which claimed to help users work out the size of a man’s penis using the always reliable shoe-size comparison method. Checker, real name Ernest Evans, said the punny app violated his trademarks and publicity rights, and sued HP for distributing it.

In a case that’s interesting beyond the dick-pun around which it is based, Checker’s lawsuit will test whether the operator of an app store can be held liable for trademark infringements committed by third-party app developers, either directly or as a contributory infringer.

Evans’ legal team say HP should be held liable because, like the operators of the bigger app stores, it vets each app before making them available via its proprietary platform. That vetting process should include checks regards trademark violation, the Evans lawsuit says.

But HP is citing various American legal principles, including the so called “innocent publisher defence” and safe harbours in the Communications Decency Act to say that as the distributor rather than maker of The Chubby Checker, it can’t be sued under trademark or publicity rights law.

HP also note that, while the offending app wasn’t free – as originally thought – only 88 copies of the digital tool were sold at a price of 99 cents before the technology firm was made aware of the trademark claim and removed it from its app store. HP’s cut from those sales would be less than $20.

It remains to be seen if judges allow this case to proceed properly to court.

Following similar deals with Samsung, Toshiba and Blackberry, 7Digital has announced a partnership with HP which will see the company power an MP3 download service on the IT firm’s new tablet computer.

Says 7Digital dude Ben Drury: “HP is a worldwide leader in consumer electronics and we are very pleased to deliver the 7Digital global music experience to their sleek-designed and highly functional tablet device. Through the use of 7Digital’s platform, HP TouchPad users will have an optimised music experience at launch”.

HP VP of something or other Richard Kerris added: “High-quality applications and music are essential to the HP TouchPad. 7Digital’s deep catalogue of music and robust platform will help us bring a great music experience to our customers”.

Both eMusic and Hewlett Packard are planning on jumping on the digital locker bandwagon, according to reports. Whether they’ll follow Apple in securing record label support for their cloud-based music storage flim flams, or go the “it’s just storage, we don’t need licenses” route taken by Amazon and Google remains to be seen.

eMusic boss man Adam Klein told Billboard his company hopes to launch some sort of locker service in the final quarter of this year, adding that he thinks his bigger competitors “are doing exactly the right thing” by moving into the access-your-content-anywhere space.

eMusic, of course, already operates a subscription system, whereby users basically bulk-buy a set number of tracks each month (more or less, the system changed a bit last year), so presumably any locker service could be tacked on to that. It’s not clear if eMusic’s locker would just offer remote access and back-ups of music downloaded via the platform itself (the service’s users are already able to re-download purchases), or if it would offer the facility to upload your entire MP3 collection, as Amazon, Google and Apple do.

Digital Music News last week noted that eMusic’s subscriber levels have remained pretty static since 2007, despite the company expanding its catalogue considerably via deals with the major record companies in the US. Of course, the conditions of some of those major label deals led to some of the big indies exiting the service, which possibly means any new subscribers attracted by the newly enlarged eMusic catalogue were counterbalanced by some of the service’s traditional muso customer base cancelling their subscriptions.

Either way, Klein is known to be planning a number of innovations in the coming months in a bid to instigate a new period of subscriber growth. A preview streaming service is expected to come online soon, though the digital locker is probably part of those plans also.

HP is planning a new digital content service – including music and movies – to go with its iPad competing TouchPad tablet computer. Although still at an early stage, it is thought that the IT firm is considering offering a digital locker to enable users to consume content across multiple devices. It’s also thought they are considering a subscription-based streaming content service similar to Sony’s Qriocity platform. That said, HP have had musical ambitions before, most of which came to little, so it remains to be seen how things turn out this time.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/now-emusic-and-hp-are-considering-digital-lockers-too/feed/0Plan B teams up with HP for cinema adhttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/plan-b-teams-up-with-hp-for-cinema-ad/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/plan-b-teams-up-with-hp-for-cinema-ad/#respondFri, 10 Jun 2011 11:21:18 +0000http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/?p=30765
Plan B features in a new HP advert (computers not sauce) to be screened in cinemas, which sees him explain in the simplest terms possible how he wrote his song, ‘She Said’.

Text at the beginning of the ad announces that it features 3D sound and is best heard on headphones, which is great for people watching it in a cinema. Presumably it’s hoped that viewers will rush home to check it out again on their PCs, using some headphone like technology. Before you do that, I’ll save you the disappointment and tell you that ‘3D sound’ seems to mean ‘stereo sound’. Unless HP laptops do something very special, which the ad seems to claim they do.

Hewlett-Packard is reportedly planning to launch a digital locker and streaming music service, details of which have surfaced on smartphone website PreCentral, which somehow got its hands on an internal PowerPoint presentation from the tech firm.

It is thought that HP’s digital entertainment platform, which will also offer movies, will let users store their digital content on a remote server and stream it back to any net connected device, ie the same as Amazon’s recently launched locker service, and similar to those reportedly being planned by Apple and Google.

One USP the HP service may offer is that it will work out what tracks a user listens to most often, and then store copies of those songs on a user’s portable devices as well as the central server, thus reducing the bandwidth implications of accessing music via the service.

No word on possible timelines for all this, nor whether HP plan to get the digital locker licensed by the music companies, or go the Amazon route and claim no such licence is required.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/hp-developing-music-service/feed/0HP say ownership still more important than access for digital music fanshttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/hp-say-ownership-still-more-important-than-access-for-digital-music-fans/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/hp-say-ownership-still-more-important-than-access-for-digital-music-fans/#respondTue, 18 May 2010 10:41:00 +0000/post/HP-say-ownership-still-more-important-than-access-for-digital-music-fans.aspx

A new survey by PC firm HP suggests music fans still want to own music, despite some saying “access” rather than “ownership” will be the key thing in the future.

The distinction between “access” and “ownership” is important in the digital domain; consumers who want the former are more likely to opt for subscription-based digital services, while those opting for the latter will want iTunes-style a la carte downloads where they get an MP3 to keep at the end of the transaction.

Obviously, a la carte services have enjoyed more success to date, though some still reckon that subscription services will dominate in the future, sometimes justifying that viewpoint by saying that the kids prefer access to ownership.

In HP’s survey 64% of respondents said they preferred to own music than pay to access a subscription service with a vast catalogue of tunes, while 73% said they didn’t expect to completely shift to a subscription model and stop collecting MP3s.

The report also says that, while 16-34 year olds were unsurprisingly the most digital savvy of respondents, 39% of that group were still buying CDs.

Commenting on his company’s research, HP Home Server Manager Shaun Hobbs told reporters: “In this technologically driven age it is easy to get carried away and think that everybody is embracing digital and leaving physical behind. Our survey shows that this isn’t the case. Britons are on an evolutionary journey with digital media still being bought on multiple formats and enjoyed using a variety of devices”.

As previously reported, HP recently launched a new digital service powered by Omnifone which offers both access and ownership, with subscription-based unlimited listening plus ten MP3s a month.